oldWeather forum moderator Caro has been showcasing the history in our logs, by tweeting, every day, excerpts from the logs of exactly 100-years ago (follow along here). The terse style of the logs is a good match for Twitter, but on some days so much happened that we’d like to go into more detail. December 8th, 1914 was such a day, so Caro has written this post:

It’s been said before: oldWeather is not just about the weather. We transcribe history too and few of the historical narratives to emerge from our WWI ships’ logs can compare to the events that took place on this day, 8 December, 100 years ago: the Battle of the Falkland Islands. The logs of all nine Royal Navy ships involved ― Bristol, Canopus, Carnarvon, Cornwall, Glasgow, Inflexible, Invincible, Kent, and Macedonia ― have given our transcribers and editors first-hand accounts of one of the most important sea battles of WWI.

Back on November 1, Admiral von Spee and his German cruisers had defeated a Royal Navy squadron near Coronel, Chile. British losses were heavy; the ships Good Hope and Monmouth were lost and with them the lives of about 1600 men. Glasgow and Otranto escaped. The British Admiralty, realising the danger of the German ships escaping into the South Atlantic and disrupting the Allies’ operations along the African coast; or sailing around the Horn to attack the now almost defenceless British base in the Falkland Islands, sent a squadron to the South Atlantic to track down von Spee’s cruisers. Eight Royal Navy warships assembled at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands on December 7. The old battleship Canopus had been set in place as guardship for Port Stanley, resting on the mud, since mid-November.

On 8 December, the German cruisers Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nürnberg, Dresden and Leipzig, together with three auxiliary vessels, gathered to attack the Falklands and raid the British facilities there. Gneisenau and Nürnberg detached from the rest of the German squadron and moved to attack the wireless station and port facilities of Port Stanley. The two raiders were seen by a hilltop spotter who reported their approach to Canopus, waiting out of sight behind the hills.

To use our historical results, we teamed up with Gordon and Naval-History.net. In Gordon’s words: ‘Our present world has been shaped by World War 1 – as much a maritime war as World War 2. Not just the Battle of Jutland or the Allies near-defeat by the U-boats, but Mediterranean, Belgian coast, South West & South Africa, East Africa, Persian Gulf, German raiders, Atlantic convoys, North Russia.’ We need to present our logbook records so they can contribute to public and scholarly understanding of the period.

The transcribed and edited logbook records are now a major component of naval-history.net, where they are described as:

British warship log books of the World War 1 era, totalling some 300,000 pages. The logs of over 300 ships have been transcribed, and most are online. They include coverage of Battle of the Falklands, Northern Patrol, Dardanelles, East Africa, trans-Atlantic convoys, Indian Ocean, China Station, amounting to some 60-70 percent of all major warship movements 1914-18, outside of British home waters.

But they are not enough on their own, we should combine them with other sources of information. Naval-History.Net has prepared for the centenary for some years, using contemporary sources where possible and more recent research where available. Current projects include:

Chronology providing the political and military background to the war at sea.

Royal Navy warships and auxiliaries from the invaluable “Ships of the Royal Navy 1914-1919” by Dittmar and Colledge. Although still in progress, all warships and many of the auxiliaries are listed by name and by type/class.

Many thanks for bringing your transcription skills to bear on…well…the BEAR—arguably the most famous vessel to serve in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service— and all the other U.S. vessel logs that will be coming your way via Old Weather. We’ve been watching with excitement as the WWI-era Royal Navy project wrapped up, and anticipating the shift to the logs of the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and other sea-going services. We have been busy prepping the logs and clicking the shutters to keep you supplied.

Allow us to introduce ourselves. There are three of us in the National Archives team: Mark C. Mollan, Elizabeth Hope, and Luydmilla Mishonova. Mark is a Navy/Maritime Reference Archivist and is charged with getting the records prepped and camera ready. Elizabeth works in digital preservation at Archives 1 (on the National Mall in Washington D.C.). She images the log book pages and makes sure every detail is captured. Milla is photographing additional Navy and Coast Survey logbooks at Archives 2 in Maryland.

We’ve already come across some interesting dramas and historical footnotes. The December 1897 log book for the BEAR covers the start of the harrowing Overland Expedition, which took a small Revenue Cutter Service crew from Cape Vancouver to Point Barrow, Alaska. After a journey of more than 1500 miles, 200 stranded whalemen were rescued from starvation.

We are so grateful for the opportunity to dust off these records of yesteryear and make the weather of the past relevant to climate science of today, as well as share these wonderful stories with generations to come. We look forward to corresponding with all of you citizen scientists on this groundbreaking collaboration.

The weather in Exeter yesterday was best described as “ocr“, so I missed the transit this time. Fortunately, the skies were clear back in 2004, and I remember the experience of peering through a pair of binoculars equipped with a sun-filter and seeing the small black dot of Venus silhouetted against the sun.

The transit of Venus is a periodic event, and the big year was in 1769. I understand that the astronomers valued the transit as a way to get a handle on the size of the universe; but the real virtue was that it provided an excuse for the British Government to send an expedition down into the South Pacific. That expedition was commanded by James Cook, and it started the career of the greatest explorer of them all.

Saturday, 3rd. This day proved as favourable to our purpose as we could wish. Not a Cloud was to be seen the whole day, and the Air was perfectly Clear, so that we had every advantage we could desire in observing the whole of the Passage of the planet Venus over the Sun’s Disk. We very distinctly saw an Atmosphere or Dusky shade round the body of the planet, which very much disturbed the times of the Contact, particularly the two internal ones. Dr. Solander observed as well as Mr. Green and myself, and we differ’d from one another in Observing the times of the Contact much more than could be expected. Mr. Green’s Telescope and mine where of the same Magnifying power, but that of the Doctor was greater than ours. It was nearly calm the whole day, and the Thermometer Exposed to the Sun about the Middle of the day rose to a degree of heat we have not before met with.

The ideal weather observer does not expose his thermometer to the sun (shade temperatures please), so perhaps it’s no great loss that Cook’s journal does not contain regular weather observations. For those, we must turn to the Master’s log of HM Bark Endeavour (the closest equivalent to the familiar modern-day logs). For the day of the transit, this records “Little wind and variable with fine pleasant clear weather”. I reckon that’s “Lt. Airs, Var., 1, b” in our notation. Sadly, none of the logs contain regular thermometer or barometer observations – Cook did better on his subsequent voyages – but we do get wind speed and direction reports for every day.

We’d expect the Royal Navy to spend most of their time in British ports, but we deliberately chose the logs we’re looking at to include those going foreign, and omit the stay-at-homes, because this gives us better information on global weather. This choice means that foreign ports are the most frequently mentioned in our logs. In the 300,000 or so log-pages we’ve looked at so far, Hong Kong tops the ‘most visited’ table (with 23,000 mentions), followed by Bermuda and Shanghai. The first UK port comes in fourth: Devonport (6000 mentions) and though most of these are for the UK naval base near Plymouth, its statistics are boosted by the existence of another base of the same name in Auckland.

The existence of two Devonports highlights a difficulty we run into in using the port names. When the ship is in port, and sometimes when it is operating close to land, the port name or landmark is the only information we have on the ship’s location. So we have to convert the name into a latitude and longitude, and this can be challenging. For many ports a position is not hard to find: Gibraltar, Bombay, Glasgow and Aden are all well known. Many more are only a quick web search away: Esquimalt is on Vancouver Island, Thursday Island is in the Torres strait, and Walvis Bay is in Namibia.

With the technology of 1914-22, sorting all this out into a set of positions would have been a terrible job; but modern internet search engines, atlases, encyclopaedias and gazetteers are very powerful tools for tracking down obscure and badly spelt place-names. Today I’m particularly grateful that I live in the future.

As we said in our recent blog post, Old Weather has been churning through Royal Navy logbooks from World War 1 for long enough now that we can start to extract some interesting stats from the words transcribed by the community.

Social networks are all the rage now, but here at Zooniverse HQ we’ve been wondering what the 90-year-old social graph of Old Weather would look like. We’ll have more to say in the near future about the interactions of people on board the Royal Navy ships from our logs, but what about the ships themselves? When ships pass each other at sea, or meet to exchange supplies, officers and information, they make a note of this in their logs.

This enormous chart shows all of the Old Weather ships in a big grid, highlighting in purple where ships connect to each other. You can look down the chart, or across it, to find the interactions for a given ship. You can see that the HMS Arlanza and the Alsation seem to meet up with quite a few of the other ships of the chart. Both are Armed Merchant Cruisers that cross the busy stretch between the UK and the USA. So is the HMS Motugua, and it too has a fair few interactions with other vessels.

Taking those ships that are often mentioned, we can delve further into their interactions and create arc plots for those vessels. The arc plot below, for the HMS Alsatian, shows that it has encountered 26 ships in the transcriptions made to date. The thickness of the lines connecting vessels indicates the relative number of times that the two ships reference each other. The HMS Moldavia and HMS Patia are fairly well-connected with the Alsatian.

What isn’t shown on the large network plot is that the most mentioned vessel in the Old Weather fleet is the HMS Bee, a river gunboat and a ship that is only 36% complete so far on Old Weather (maybe you could jump aboard and help to complete it?). This ship is not mentioned a great deal by every ship but rather features regularly in the logs of a few vessel in the fleet. The arc plot for the HMS Bee is shown below. The HMS Bee interacts a great deal with the HMS Scarab and the HMS Cricket. all three are gunboats, as is the HMS Gnat. The next step here is to examine the logs and find out when these vessels interacted so much, and why. A blog post of these at a later time.

Finally, for this post, let’s look at the arc plot for the top twenty most-connected vessels in Old Weather so far. These are the ships from the large network plot that connect with the most other ships. These plots can be made for the whole fleet – but they become very large and complex and thus difficult to take value from. This slimmed-down version showing just the top twenty gives you an idea of the ships that are linked to other ships.

This is the kind of simplistic data that can be extracted from your transcriptions of events. So far, only the development team have been looking at this, but the tools are being made available to the historians of Old Weather for further analysis. I’m excited by what they can uncover.

Many of the ships listed in these charts are available on our Old Weather Voyages page, so you can see for yourselves how they interact with each other. You can use that page to read the log entries and see where ships were when they encountered one another. We’re always trying to find new ways for everyone to explore the Old Weather data and if you have any suggestions we’d love to hear them, either here on the blog or via twitter @oldweather.

Can you believe that Old Weather is 44% complete‽ I can’t, but that’s what the site is currently telling me. It’s amazing how much care and effort has been poured into this project by people all over the world. 63 vessels are now complete and the task of processing and understanding everything is underway.

Yesterday we said we had a little thank you coming and here it is: Old Weather Voyages. Stuart Lynn, the principal developer for Old Weather, and myself have been toying with the idea of displaying your weather and event transcriptions in a fun and interesting way. Old Weather Voyages lets you see the data that you have all provided in a way that puts the voyages of these ships front and centre

The Old Weather Voyages site displays one ship’s log book at a time and lets you watch events unfold as they did nearly a centrury ago. you can either just sit back and watch the ship at it voyages around the globe, or you can grab the time slider and whiz back and forth, seeing what happens and when.

As the ship moves around the world, its track is coloured according the the sea temperatures that have been recorded. The events from the ship’s log are shown on the log page on the left hand side. The image below shows the voyage of the HMS Africa up to the afternoon of Saturday November 3rd 1917. The log on the left shows that there have been several sicknesses reported over the past week on the ship. The ship’s track shows that the water is warmer nearer the equator than it is in South Africa, for example.

We hope that this new way of exploring the Old Weather data shows not only that the information being transcribed is coherent and useful, but also that your data really does go somewhere! We are often asked, here at the Zooniverse, what happens to your clicks and transcriptions. Here is a great way to explore the early results of the project and explore the history behind the science.